By Nathan Jackson
October 21 2006

It's not very often that you'll ever see your side score 7 goals, let alone a striker score his 2nd hat-trick in a week. It was a great all around performance from the Imps and only an 85th goal prevented us from going top of the table. The title race is definately on following this win.  

There's not a lot that I can say that won't be said many times during the next few days. However, let's start with the only 3 things that didn't make this a near perfect day. Firstly, who is the DJ trying to kid??? The music at Sincil Bank is a joke and people doing into the stadium don't want to hear Dolly Parton, it's not football music. Secondly, the over-watering of the pitch, just a few hours after it had rained, almost cost us as Beevers and Brown kept on falling over. Finally, the one time we want Accrington to win and they sod it up, just typical really.

There's only one place to start with the praise and there's no prizes for guessing where that's going. I said a few weeks ago that Jamie Forrester was one of the most intelligent footballer's I'd seen in ages and you can't even begin to argue with 2 hat-tricks in a week. However, I still don't choose him as my man of the match, that is a choice between Mark Stallard and.........Nicky Eaden, no, seriously!

Stallard's vision with the goals he helped set up was fantastic and his own goals were both well taken and he was also unlucky not to bag his hat-trick. I didn't actually realise how much Eaden was involved in the game until writting the match report and noticing his name coming up when describing the build-up to a lot of the goals. I'll be honest and I say that I was wrong about Eaden, obviously he's now playing in his natural position but his improvement over the last few weeks has been remarkable and it'll be interesting to see how the Imps cope after his loan expires after next week's win.

Everything just seemed to click today and every time that the Imps came forward, we looked like scoring, however, so did Rochdale nd in all fairness, the first half was arguably the most entertaining of the season so far. Luckily however, the 2nd half was all one way traffic and I cant recall Marriott touching the ball until nearly full time in the 2nd half.

I can't even begin to tell you how odd the chant "7-1 to the mighty Imps" sounded and I, along with several other just looked around with the "what the hell is going on" face. However, to say this is the perfect result ahead of the game against Swindon.